The delicate job a heartbeat away from the presidency
If he plays his cards right, Ramaphosa could succeed Zuma, writes S’thembiso Msomi
AFEW months before the 2007 ANC national conference that elected Jacob Zuma as party president, about 100 former guerrillas gathered at his Nkandla homestead.
Zuma — who was ANC deputy president at the time and involved in a bitter battle for power with party boss Thabo Mbeki — slaughtered a beast for his visitors.
But theirs was no social visit. The former liberation struggle fighters had come to complain to Zuma about being “neglected” by the ANC government. Most of these veterans were unemployed and lived in abject poverty. In Zuma, they saw a leader who would give an ear to their frustrations. He did.
But Zuma also used the gathering to register his own grievances about fellow ANC leaders.
According to some of the former Umkhonto weSizwe soldiers who were at the meeting, he told of a concerted campaign to isolate him that had started soon after the ANC’s return from exile.
More instructive, however, were the comments he is said to have made at the meeting about Cyril Ramaphosa, who had been elected ANC secretary-general after the party’s unbanning.
Zuma, who served under Ramaphosa as ANC deputy secretary-general in the early 1990s, is said to have described Ramaphosa’s election as having been a “grave mistake” because the former trade unionist did not have enough experience in the ANC leadership.
By all accounts, their relationship as secretary-general and deputy secretary-general at the time was fraught with difficulties.
Hence, as Zuma’s announcement of a new cabinet loomed last week, there were still those with doubts about whether he would pick Ramaphosa as his deputy.
As ANC deputy president, the trade unionist turned billionaire obviously stood a great chance. But a president is not constitutionally obliged to pick his party’s number two as his deputy.
For instance, were it not for the last-minute collapse of a deal between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, Mangosuthu Buthelezi — rather than Zuma — would have been named by Mbeki as deputy president in 1999.
Ramaphosa’s detractors worked hard behind the scenes to discourage his appointment as deputy president, largely because they believed the post would give him a huge advantage in a future race to be Zuma’s successor.
Some tried to exploit the past, pointing out that Ramaphosa once stepped down from an ANC post without finishing his term, as well as his frosty relationship with Zuma in the 1990s.
Others used the gender card, saying Zuma ought to appoint ANC national chairwoman Baleka Mbete as his deputy to show the party’s commitment to gender parity.
But Zuma stood firm. He wanted Ramaphosa as his deputy in the Union Buildings. Now that he has got his man, the burning question is whether the relationship will work.
Since the dawn of democracy, the relationship between the president
❛
Unless Zuma’s leftist allies throw a spanner in the works over the next 12 months, Ramaphosa looks set to play a much more active and visible role
and deputy president has always been fraught with tension.
When Mbeki served as Nelson Mandela’s deputy, staff in his office would sometimes complain about the president’s office delegating few important duties to him.
A similar complaint could be heard from Zuma’s office when he worked as Mbeki’s deputy. Much of Zuma’s first term as deputy president was spent mediating in the peace talks between warring parties in Burundi. He had little to do with the actual running of the country.
In the post-2007 era, many in the ANC had hoped that the good personal relationship between Zuma and the then deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, would translate to a harmonious working relationship. It did not, and Motlanthe felt increasingly isolated and excluded from government programmes — especially after he challenged Zuma for the ANC presidency.
A major plus for the ZumaRamaphosa presidency is that there is not going to be direct competition for office between the two leaders. Zuma is constitutionally barred from standing for another term in 2019.
Theoretically, he could still run for the ANC presidency because the party’s constitution has no term limits. But that is unlikely, given that party structures prefer whoever is ANC president to also run the country.
Zuma, therefore, has no reason to see Ramaphosa as a threat to his power. Instead, if Ramaphosa is indeed elected ANC president at the party’s next conference in 2017, there is the possibility of a smooth transfer of power akin to the transition during the last two years of the Mandela-Mbeki presidency.
However, this is all dependent on Zuma resisting the temptation to get involved in the leadership succession battle that is likely to take place ahead of the 2017 conference.
Already, a number of names are being bandied about as possible rivals to Ramaphosa. None of them has publicly said he or she wants the job, but talk in party circles is that national treasurer Zweli Mkhize, secretary-general Gwede Mantashe and Mbete could be in the running.
Another person who has been mooted is Nkosazana DlaminiZuma, now chairwoman of the African Union Commission.
Although Mkhize and DlaminiZuma hail from KwaZulu-Natal, which has the biggest number of ANC members in the country, it is not a given that the province would wholeheartedly support either of them were they to throw their hats into the ring.
There are still ANC branches in KwaZulu-Natal that hold a grudge against Dlamini-Zuma for not having backed her ex-husband during his titanic battle for power with Mbeki in 2007.
As far as Mkhize is concerned, he appears to have alienated a number of important lobbyists during his tenure as provincial premier.
Ramaphosa, therefore, stands a realistic chance of winning over the influential province if Zuma does not campaign against him.
On a policy level, Zuma and Ramaphosa are not likely to clash either.
Zuma has said repeatedly that the National Development Plan, of which Ramaphosa was one of the key drafters, would underpin his administration’s programme over the next five years.
Unless Zuma’s leftist allies throw a spanner in the works over the next 12 months by pushing for the rewriting of parts of the National Development Plan, Ramaphosa looks set to play a much more active and visible role than most of his predecessors in the deputy presidency.
Already the signs are there that Zuma wants to see Ramaphosa raise his public profile — he assigned him to act as mediator in the South Sudan conflict and tasked him with the job of preventing the Congress of South African Trade Unions from splitting into two federations.
Success on both fronts would give Ramaphosa great momentum heading into the 2017 ANC conference.
Even more important, however, would be to ensure that his relationship with his new boss at the Union Buildings does not degenerate into the kind of mistrust that characterised their relationship in the early 1990s.